Windows 8

Windows 8 is a personal computer operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, with an emphasis on improving its user experience on tablets. In particular, these changes included a touch-optimized Windows shell based on Microsoft's "Metro" design language, the Start screen, a new platform for developing apps with an emphasis on touchscreen input, integration with online services, support for USB 3.0, Advanced Format hard drives, near field communications, and cloud computing. Additional security features were introduced, such as built-in antivirus software, integration with Microsoft SmartScreen phishing filtering service and support for UEFI Secure Boot on supported devices with UEFI firmware.

File Manager is BACK! The Windows NT4 File Manager has apparently gone open source and has been enhanced. See: https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile (I used to love this and would download it to anything up until Windows 8 really broke it beyond use... but now I may get it back!)

Microsoft found that users running Windows 10 on newer chips (2016-era PCs with Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPUs) should not notice any slowdowns. While there are some single-digit performance penalties, they are reflected in milliseconds.

On Windows 10, Windows 8 or Windows 7 on devices with older chips (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPUs), benchmark tests showed more significant penalties and users may actually notice a decrease in performance. On Windows 10, only some users should experience slowdowns, but on older versions of the operating system most users are expected to notice performance issues.

Azure cloud platform had not seen any noticeable performance impact. Some users may experience networking performance impact, but that can be addressed using the Azure Accelerated Networking feature.

Amazon said it had not observed any significant performance impact for the overwhelming majority of EC2 workloads, but some AWS customers have complained about degraded performance after the patches were applied starting with December.

Apple, which started performing tests after releasing updates in December, also said it had not seen any measurable reduction in the performance of macOS and iOS.

Lots of folks (from their perspective) with a genuine need to keep running on Windows XP suffered a lot of grief in Tech forums as being one of the root causes of giving WannaCry a platform to spread and thrive from, yet now it appears all the criticism may have been a little premature and unjustified.

For the record, I personally don't condone anyone using unsupported operating systems and actively encourage everyone I deal with to get themselves up to date, but I am also sympathetic to those who feel they have a genuine need to do that, so also think they shouldn't be …

Hi Thomas,
Have you considered purchasing an XP Updates agreement with Microsoft? Might be an easier solution if budget restraints prevent you from upgrading? I wouldn't feel comfortable with a lot of XP machines in an environment as it would be a case of when, not if, it will come back to bite you. Patches are available, just at a cost.

Incidentally, SP3 for XP is still provided by Microsoft - why not install it?

If you've ever provided Telephone or Remote support to non technically minded computer folks, I'll bet you've faced the challenge of how to get them not to type a web address you're giving them by phone into Google, Bing, Yahoo (or any other search engine they might favor) rather than enter it into a browsers address bar.

I've been using the following trick for a while and think I've managed to save some of my hair as a result!

Tell them to open their favorite web browser

Press CTRL + L (instruct client not to touch any other keys)

Tell them to type the web address you need them to go to - like support.me

Support.me is just a web alias for the Logmein Rescue app that I subscribe to. Do you have any favorite tricks you like using when giving telephone support? Please share them in the Comments section below.

Hit the thumbs up button if you hadn't heard of (or forgotten about) this useful shortcut :-)

Even in the early days of Windows, when I was doing phone support I would not have a caller drag and drop files, since they inevitably end up accidentally dropping them in the wrong place. I tend to favour R-click Copy and R-click Paste... or even resorting to the command line for particularly tricky situations.

This may be less prevalent nowadays with using remote connections rather than guide the caller. However these are still helpful tricks for bad or slow remote connections.

Windows 8

Windows 8 is a personal computer operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, with an emphasis on improving its user experience on tablets. In particular, these changes included a touch-optimized Windows shell based on Microsoft's "Metro" design language, the Start screen, a new platform for developing apps with an emphasis on touchscreen input, integration with online services, support for USB 3.0, Advanced Format hard drives, near field communications, and cloud computing. Additional security features were introduced, such as built-in antivirus software, integration with Microsoft SmartScreen phishing filtering service and support for UEFI Secure Boot on supported devices with UEFI firmware.